Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

Xavier Dorrego wrote from Buenos Aires: The former viceroy, Liniers, was executed along with the bishop and the treasurer. Liniers had organized a counterrevolution, and all the malcontents had joined with him. There were plenty — the expulsion of the current viceroy makes it clear that authority no longer resides in Spain but in Buenos Aires and the Argentine nation. The royalists have sworn revenge. The creole merchants are unhappy. Free trade is ruining them. They cannot compete with England. You in the interior should look at yourselves in that mirror. If the merchants can’t compete, how will the producers of wine, textiles, and tools?

But our own people are discontented as well, Dorrego went on, because Cornelio Saavedra has imposed a conservative congress in opposition to Mariano Moreno’s radical representatives. Those of us with Moreno have been forced to leave the government, and Mariano Moreno himself has been sent into gilded exile in England! Our ideas of progress and rapid transformations have been postponed.

This letter cast Baltasar Bustos into a deep depression, until another letter came from me, Varela the printer, telling him that Saavedra, the army, and the conservatives had created a Public Safety Committee to root out the counterrevolutionaries. “The Committee has attacked royalists, conservatives, and radicals equally. The royalists,” I told him, “are now seeking armed assistance from Spain to reconquer the colony. The government has thus extended the persecution to all Spaniards; they’ve been arrested, exiled, and executed. The conservatives have conspired against the creole government; the merchant Martín Alzaga and forty of his close associates have been executed. And Moreno’s radicals, now leaderless, are also being persecuted. Weep, little friend: our idol, the young, brilliant, kindly Mariano Moreno died at the age of thirty-two aboard the ship taking him to England. Who’s left? Your hero Castelli has been sent to take command of the northern army, that’s where they expect the Spanish attack to come from. And here in Buenos Aires, Balta, we young followers of Moreno are again meeting — after taking precautions — in the old Café de Malcos. We are preparing to support Bernardino Rivadavia, who seems to be the most radical embodiment of our ideas of progress. We miss you, Balta, old man, you should be here with us.”

José Antonio Bustos watched his son, waiting for his reaction, waiting for his son to give him the news he already knew from his own sources. “The Buenos Aires centralist tyranny”—José Antonio did not mince words this time—“is at odds with everyone. It persecuted the Spaniards just for being Spaniards; first it ruined the businessmen and then had them shot, it decapitated its own group of liberal thinkers at the same time that it strengthened the army and gave it political powers. Is that what you call a revolution for independence, Baltasar? Is this violence supposed to fill the void left by Spain?”

“Yes,” answered the son, “but the revolution has also created a new educational system and proclaimed the rights of man, just as they did in France. And it has outlawed the infamous slave trade.”

“And it passed a law called freedom of bellies which declares that all children of slaves born from now on are free,” José Antonio said, his eyes fixed on the silver straw in his maté gourd.

“What’s so bad about that?” asked Baltasar, astonished, incredulous, above all, that this argument was actually taking place. The father and the son never raised their voices; there was something more than the politics of the revolution at stake here.

“Just read what they say in the Buenos Aires Gazette. ” Now the father, embarked on this enraged recrimination, pulled the news sheet out from among the pile of papers on his desk. “The blacks should go on serving, because slavery, as unjust as it has been, has given them a slave mentality. Once a slave, says the paper, always a slave. And it says it to attack the Spanish slave laws, which is the most ironic thing. Just accept things as they are! We’ll give you your freedom, little by little! The habit of slavery has marked them forever, won’t allow them to be free, so we’ll administer freedom to them with an eyedropper! Free bellies, but only when we say so. Those who were slaves before will go on being slaves.”

Baltasar’s only argument was that the laws regarding blacks also took care of the education of the race that had languished in subjugation for so long. “But they still have to stay in the master’s house until they’re twenty, even if they’re born free,” his father retorted.

Baltasar sensed a deep, dull pain in his father’s words, as if he’d been bitten by a snake. There were thirty thousand slaves in Argentina, but for him they were summed up in a pair of black women, a wet nurse and her sister, who held Ofelia Salamanca’s kidnapped child.

He was on the point of being honorable with his father: I kidnapped a white child. I left a black one in his place. What a surprise the judge and his wife would have had if they’d found him in that aristocratic crib! But, after their shock and rage, what would they have done? Would they have raised him as their own son or returned him to slavery? The creole republic was going to turn its back on the slavery issue; it was going to reform it only on paper. The reader of Rousseau had a premonition that split his skull like a lightning bolt. There will be freedom but not equality.

“The President of the Superior Court and the marquise returned to Chile. She looked splendid dressed all in black as she left the court in mourning for her son, burned to death in the sinister fire of May 25. No one thinks it was an accident. The counterrevolutionaries say a liberal mob entered the residence as part of the terrorism they attribute to us. If they only knew that all we did was try to face up to the many problems that lingered on without a solution for three centuries in the colony’s cellars! What was better, to go on ignoring them or to bring them out into the light of day, acknowledge them and say: Look, there are problems, difficulties, contradictions. The revolution’s sincerity gets mixed up with the revolution’s terror, brother Baltasar. The same thing happened in France. Remind anyone who argues against us of that fact,” his friend Dorrego wrote.

“The same thing happened in France!” exclaimed Baltasar to his father.

“I have real fears about the freedom of the nation and the unity of our countries,” said the old man calmly. “I would have preferred the solution proposed by Aranda, Charles III’s minister: that we form a confederation of Spain and her colonies, which would be sovereign but united. Strong. Not weakened by uncalled-for excesses and fatal dissension.”

“Things would not have gotten better without a revolution,” replied the son. “In France, neither the king nor the nobility would have given up an iota of their privilege if the revolution hadn’t wrenched them out of their hands. It was the king who set off the violence. You’re right — a civilized agreement would have been better. But it didn’t happen that way, not there and not here. What matters to me is that we consolidate some rights for the majority, where, before, there were only many rights for just a few. If we put an end to a single abuse, a single privilege, the revolution will have been justified.”

Old José Antonio Bustos applauded in silence, with a gesture but without actually clapping his hands, as yellow as his poncho, their lines accentuated by the fluttering shadows of the dying candles during one of the longest after-dinner talks they’d ever had. Those hands were as thin as wafers but as yellow as the patriarchal poncho, not porcelain-colored like the hands of Ofelia and her husband. The applause meant: “Bravo! You’re addressing me as if I were a multitude.” His words were firm but tender.